Beer Gun: Bottling from a Keg

Since we dont drink the Steam beer at all, and today I was scheduled to bottle the Belgian Pale, I decided to throw a curveball and keg the Belgian Pale. Since we dont have any empty kegs, we would have to free one up by bottling the contents. I had been reading about bottling from kegs and you can buy commercial "beer guns" for ~$125, but since we do this on-the-cheap, I decided to make one myself. In the picture above you can see that I just inserted a bottling wand into the business-end of a picnic tap, the little stopper (circled in red) is the key to the homemade beer gun. When filling bottles (pictured below) the stopper is in the bottle neck to create a seal. The increased pressure inside the bottle then pushes back against the foam that would be building and minimizes it. You simply fill and then periodically "burp" the excess pressure inside the bottle by deforming the stopper.

It took a few bottles to get the hang of it, and I still need some practice getting a good final volume in the bottle, but overall I was able to successfully bottle 25 bottles of the Steam and then keg the Belgian Pale Ale. The homemade beer gun isnt really meant to bottle entire batches because it is a somewhat slow process: fill 6 bottles, cap 6 bottles, then repeat. The filling is also a bit slower than filling from a bottling bucket and as a result, it took me 30-40 minutes to fill and cap 25 bottles. The main purpose of the gun then is to fill a few bottles (probably 6 or less) for quick use like going to a friend's house, camping, etc. When we need some bottles, we'll just fill up a few and be on our way. Since we have a stopper that also works on growlers, we can fill those too without the mess and waste that normally comes with filling growlers (you know what I mean if you watched a bartender at a brewery fill a growler and waste a lot of beer filling the growler until the foam is gone). The best part of the beer gun was the cost. I already had the bottling wand, picnic tap,and beverage line, so I only had to buy the stopper. Grand total: $0.50.